


this body like a lantern beside me

by notbecauseofvictories



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 07:01:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5617654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>rey and finn can't sleep, and have a conversation</p>
            </blockquote>





	this body like a lantern beside me

It was called the heap.

Poe had explained it to him like this: the D’Qar base had been built twenty years ago with a much smaller force in mind, just the vital command staff and a company’s worth of pilots, no more. A nerve center for the Resistance, more than its sole base of operations.

But people kept showing up, and New Republic funding had stalled, so they’d just wedged them in, wherever there was room. And when there wasn’t any more room, they’d shoved cots into an empty x-wing hangar, and sent everyone below lieutenant there to pick out a bunk.

Arrangements had shifted some since then—for one, the hangar wasn’t empty any more, and walking through it in the dark was a good way to stub your toe on a spare novaldex generator. More than a few of the younger members had pushed their beds together, creating little flotillas of pillows and rumpled sheets; others had hung hammocks and laundry lines between the support pylons. The walls were papered with pinups of varying species, a number of defaced Resistance recruiting posters, flickering holophotos of those loved and left behind on safer shores. There was no discernible path through the sprawling mess, and so patrol-change was always chaos, pilots stumbling into flight suits and ground crew knocking over the divider screens in their hurry.

General Organa had once referred to it as the Resistance’s trash heap. She probably hadn’t counted on her soldiers’ perverse sense of humor—the name stuck.

So it was called the heap. 

Finn hated it.

Not the name, the name was fine—maybe a little strange, to find that soldiers the galaxy over found the same shit funny. (They’d served a kind of whitish gravy on Starkiller base which had been universally known as “General Hux’s special sauce”. Something about armies, you could always complain about what they fed you or where you slept.)

But he wasn’t used to the sound of so many bodies, breathing in the dark. The Iktotchi in the corner tended to snore, and the Echath tossed and turned, cots groaning in protest. A few of the pilots who had fought in the first Rebellion had nightmares, their shouting echoing off the metal walls until everyone in the heap was awake, reaching for blasters or knives, half out of bed and moving.

(The first time it happened, Finn had just stared. To see the Resistance mostly undressed, tired-eyed and clinging limply to their weapons as they reassured an old man it was fine, he was safe….They were soft, yawning, nothing like the horror stories stormtroopers whispered to one another of the deadly Resistance, cruel and proud. Finn wasn’t sure what to make of it, that gentleness.)

Even after the lights went off in the heap, there was always someone writing a letter back home, someone watching an old reel, their faces eerie-lit in the glow from the holopads. Quiet conversations, quiet laughter, quiet moans and sighs (bodies briefly sketched out in shadow on the screen dividers, and Finn had to turn away, grind the heel of his palm against his eyes because it was too easy to wonder if—would it be like that with—)

He never thought he would miss the bare shelves stormtroopers were assigned, but at least they had come with a partition that shut out the world. _Glorified coffins,_ AN-4321 had called them once, and Finn had agreed then. Now, he thought he would give anything for that silence, even the illusion of privacy.

AN-4321 had been reassigned shortly after, and Finn hadn’t seen her again. He wondered—

“ _Finn.”_

The hiss startled him upright, and he nearly knocked whoever it was in the face with his elbow, lashing out. It took him a minute for his eyes to adjust, and pick out the vague dark shape, kneeling at the side of his bed. “Rey?” he whispered.

“I can’t sleep _,”_ Rey murmured. “Budge over.”

He stared at her blankly, and after a minute she huffed and pushed deliberately at his shoulder. He edged backwards, towards the other side of the bed, until he was in danger of falling over and onto the hard concrete. Then she climbed up onto the bed, slipping under the thin sheets and the one blanket he’d managed to steal from the med bay.

The bed wasn’t really big enough to accommodate them both, and her knees bumped against his as she settled beside him. Finn fought down the shivery-hot impulse to reach out, and feel for her in the dark, to be sure she was there. After a moment, the bed was still again, and silence washed back through the heap. 

They were lying on their sides, facing one another. She was so close that he could feel the heat from her skin, hear her breathing. Her face was a vague and shadowy shape; unreadable, even close enough for Finn to reach out and touch it. (He very carefully did not think about reaching out and touching her face in the dark, not even just with his fingertips.)

“How is this going to help you sleep?” Finn whispered.

“It won’t. But you were awake too, so I thought…” She fell silent suddenly. “Why are you awake anyway?” she whispered.

Finn swallowed. “We….we had separate bunks.” ( _Back when I was a stormtrooper,_ goes unsaid.) “You didn’t hear people breathing and snoring and moving around. I think I was better off in the med bay.” He’d been so eager to leave, to be recovered, to stretch without that _ache_  between his shoulder blades. 

If he had still been with the Order, they would have replaced the damaged tissue, given supplements and kept him in stasis until it was fully healed. He wouldn’t have even a scar. But The Resistance did things (everything) differently. And when Major Kalonia announced that he was finally well enough to resume duty, to smell something other than antiseptic and do interminable stretches, he’d nearly kissed her.

“You could ask Poe,” Rey murmured. “He’s a commander, isn’t he? He would probably let you sleep in his private quarters.”

“Poe’s already sharing with Numb and Pava,” he whispered. “No one but the General sleeps alone.”

“Ask her, then,” Rey said, and he could hear the smile in her voice.

“The only way the General says yes to that is if you ask her for me, put that jedi stuff to good use,” he said, and Rey laughed, very softly. Finn shifted, just to find a more comfortable place, and they bumped knees again. “So, um. What about you, why can’t you sleep?” he asked.

She was quiet for such a long time that he thought she might not answer. “Do you ever have nightmares?”

“Sometimes,” Finn said softly. (More now, that he wasn’t sleeping in a regulation bed, equipped with a regulation emitter that stimulated delta waves and kept stormtroopers from dreaming. His nightmares were bloody, and screaming—Kylo Ren come back to finish the job; Rey abandoned, dead, Poe crushed in wreckage, Jakku, with endless sand.

The worst one was finding himself back on Starkiller base, and all he could think of was to _run,_ only he couldn’t take his helmet off, his armor was welded to his skin and no one in the Resistance would listen when he said—) 

“Why, did you have…?” he asked quietly.

“Not a nightmare, a dream. A—bad dream, I guess. Or a strange one. Like a memory, but not.”

“Your family,” Finn guessed, and heard her soft intake of breath. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” she said, and was silent. 

Finn wasn’t sure what had happened between Rey and Luke Skywalker, out in that unmapped bit of the galaxy, but Rey had come back with her jaw set and a little bit more grief in her eyes. She still carried the lightsaber, but he hadn’t seen her use it, or even touch it, except to fit it into her belt. She didn’t talk about it either.

“Do you miss Jakku at night?” he asked quietly.

“ _Dicarrif_ , no,” Rey whispered, sounding horrified at the idea. After a minute, she added, “The wind over the desert always sounded like it was trying to scratch its way in, to swallow you whole. When I was younger I was terrified of it, I would stuff my ears with cotton before I went to sleep. If you listen to it too long, it drives you crazy.”

The dull light from someone’s holopad caught her shoulder, and Finn couldn’t pull his eyes away from the line of it, haloed in blue. When he looked back at the vague shape of her face, he could feel her gazing back. (Was that the Force? He still wasn’t sure.) “I used to imagine I was on a green island in a blue sea,” Rey said softly, and for some reason Finn could feel his heart kick-start, throbbing in his ears. “I used to—that was where my family was. And I would imagine….how happy we were. Because otherwise, it was just me, and the darkness, and the noise of the wind.”

It was dark in the heap, dark as the inside of his skull or a moonless desert, but Finn reached out, groping for her hand. After a moment, he heard her shift, and then their hands brushed; he laced his fingers with hers so tightly he was afraid he might leave bruises. (She made a soft, bitten-off sound, and he loosened his grip, but she snatched his hand back, and held it fast. Her fingers were cold.)

“I guess Nerro’s snoring’s not so bad,” Finn said, and Rey laughed, a soft whuff of breath. 

Finn’s eyes were just beginning to feel gritty when Rey’s breathing eased into the long, slow rhythms of sleep, her hand going loose in his. She mumbled into his pillow, and he caught _capacitor_ and _parsec_ before he let himself drowse off. Her hand was warmer, clutched to his chest.

When he woke up the next morning, she had wisps of dark hair falling in her eyes and a knee jammed against his stomach. She had also stolen all the blankets, and kicked half of them onto the floor of the heap.

(Her hand, though, was still fast in his.)


End file.
